


Walking After Midnight

by rufeepeach



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-03
Updated: 2013-10-03
Packaged: 2017-12-28 08:35:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/989958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rufeepeach/pseuds/rufeepeach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ichabod wakes up alone in his bed, and reality finally comes crashing down. Katrina is dead, her bones scattered in the old sewers and tunnels beneath the town, and no amount of visions can compare to flesh and bone. Even the sanest of men can find themselves out in the dark at two in the morning, when they know they are truly all alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Walking After Midnight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ambrosia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ambrosia/gifts).



> This is set just after 1x02, and is for Val who didn't want angst :D

Witches were not granted proper burials.

Ichabod had known this, and still he had hoped, when he saw Katrina’s grave… well, he had hoped that perhaps the custom had changed, and that she’d been buried in consecrated ground after all.

The thought plagues him, as Abbie escorts him back to what passes for his abode these days. They did not bury her in a holy churchyard, as she would have wanted – as she perhaps still wants. Maybe she isn’t dead. Maybe she can come back, as he did, and life is more difficult now that the line with death is so terribly blurred. He has seen her after all, spoken to her: perhaps she can be freed, if only she could tell him how.

And oh, Ichabod wants to believe. He wants to know for fact that the woman who appears in his dreams and visions is his wife, his true wife, and that what she tells him is truth. He wants to be certain that there is something real left of the woman he had loved so dearly, so very long ago.

They drive back in silence, in Lieutenant Mills’ horseless carriage, and she deposits him back in his ‘home’ before bidding him goodnight, and leaving for her own. He watches her go, and wonders if she feels as confused and scared when she thinks of Sheriff Corbin, as he does now.

For truly, it matters not whether the Katrina in his dreams is real or imagined: his wife is still dead, either way. The same as he is, but not quite: she has purpose, answers, where he has a nonsensical new world and nothing but questions.

He falls into bed with a sigh, and tries to ignore how his hair smells of burnt witch as he tries to fall asleep.

Try as he might, however, he does not sleep well, and awakes only hours later with a start, reaching blindly for the woman who should lie beside him. She can soothe his fevered mind, he knows, with her soft words and cool hands. Katrina has magic in her touch; he’s always known this.

Magic. The word rouses him, and suddenly, horribly, he is all alone in his cold bed.

And, suddenly, with heartbreaking clarity, he knows that Katrina is dead.

He knew it before, rationally, but now… oh, God above, now Ichabod can _feel_ it. He wonders if he has been in a state of shock ever since he was awoken, between the arrest and the new world and the horseman and the witch; he wonders if he ever stopped to think.

Thinking is painful, though: it is likely that his self of twelve hours ago knew that, as this present Ichabod apparently does not.

He lies in the too-soft bed and stares at the ceiling, and is drawn, inexorably, into his thoughts. It is a deep pit, black and dark, and at the bottom grief awaits, the kind of grief that Ichabod had hoped against hope that he had avoided at all costs.

Katrina is dead, and her bones lie in an unmarked cesspit under the city, unmarked and uncared for. He would not be able to find what is left of his beloved among the remains of her friends and her enemies, scattered without thought in the darkest hole the town could find.

He doesn’t even have a grave by which to leave flowers. The world that hauled him back from the peaceful dead, and which has burdened him with this task of averting its very end, could not even grant him that much.

He is dressed before he knows it; his clothing reeks now of sweat and ashes and mouldy earth but he doesn’t care. His boots are soggy from the mess of the sewers, but he barely notices.

He slips past Miss Mills’ guardsman, using a side exit no one seems to have remembered and which needs only a little force to open. It isn’t raining outside as he strides over the lawn and to the street, but it should be. Ichabod feels rather strongly that it ought to be utterly pissing it down, the way he feels now.

Some bastard took his virtuous, honest, enchantress of a wife and burned her like a common demon. Those men took her bones and tossed them without care or thought or even common decency into a place fit only for waste, for shit and mud and garbage, when she was worth the lot of them put together. His wife who could have soothed his mind with a touch of her slender fingers and soft skin, with a smile and the smell of her rich red hair, and they tossed her away as if she meant less than nothing.

That thought brings a choked sob to his throat: he misses her skin, her hair, her green eyes. He misses how her tumbled auburn curls would smell when freshly washed, damp and warm, left carelessly over one shoulder as she used those mysterious and wonderful creams to smooth and pamper her bare skin. She used to smile over the other shoulder, when she caught him watching, but she would not stop, and neither would she beckon him closer, to indulge in those planes and expanses of creamy, pale flesh. She would smile because she knew what a spell she had cast upon him, and allow him only to watch as she worked a very homespun, earthy kind of magic upon her own body; as she made herself perfect.

Knowing now that, likely as not, there truly was magic involved in her little workings and methods does nothing to ruin the memory. He had always known that she was different, special, that she shone with something almost holy, but not quite. She had been radiant every day, glowing even under the mud and blood of the front lines, and her smile… his visions of Katrina never smile. He wishes that she would.

Things are dire, yes, he agrees, but she is cruel to him now. Not everything must be instructions and messages, and would it be too much for the universe to simply allow her to tell him that she loves him, that she misses him, that they will be together once more, anything?

They had such a brief time together, too brief, but long enough for him to learn to need her.

He supposes that, perhaps, is a reason for his affection for Abbie Mills: she has a similar homespun magic in her own hands, for all her sharp brashness, for all her hard denials and stubbornness. Katrina had been so soft and warm and feminine, where Abbie is hard, harsh, and twice as tough as any soldier he knew on the battlefield; Abbie is honesty where Katrina was mystery and enchantment. And yet they both have that way of looking with wide eyes at the world, that way of soothing with a look, that way of caring, that Ichabod has learned to need desperately.

He knows where he is going without thinking: through town, into the woods, and further, to the mouth of the sewers.

He is angry, and grieving, and it has been over two hundred years since his wife last breathed in this world and he cannot cope, no, not anymore. What does he care for Witnesses, for Revelations, for visions of a woman who has panic but not love in her eyes, and a gulf of two hundred years between himself and his world? He longs for Katrina’s patient fingers on his forehead, and her lullaby croon of a voice in his ear, ‘ _my love, oh my love, rest now_.’

Two hundred years, and he can still remember her voice. And it is that, which drives him into the sewer entrance, the torch device Abbie gave him firmly in hand, ready to find all that really remains of his wife. He has to, otherwise he’d have to admit that she is really gone, and all that remains is a dreamscape, where the woman he loves speaks in riddles, dressed as the witch she was murdered for truly being, without the warm smile or loving eyes he so very, very much misses.

The sewers are rank, rat-infested cesspits, but they’re honest. Sleepy Hollow, sweet little town that it is, burned his wife at the stake, and all she ever did was try to help. Its supposed sweetness is bitter lime in his mouth, and he spits at the ground in impotent defiance.

Thank goodness, this town was never his home, and he has no affection for it even now: it could burn to the ground, for all that he, exhausted and mad with reality and grief, could care. But he has no doubt that Oxford, too, will have changed immeasurably by now. Do they still read psalms before dinner in the Christ Church dining hall, or wander and discuss philosophy on the Pembroke green? Does the river still sparkle; do the deer in Magdalene’s park still thrive?

He wanders without seeing, his mind back in a time and place long gone and lost to him; he trips on an exposed pipe, and only just manages to steady himself. Reality roars back with a jolt, and he realises what an utter fool he is: he knows these sewers as well as he would know the moon, eidetic memory or no, and he could be lost for days.

There will be witch-bones scattered all over these tunnels, shook free by time and animals and water erosion. Katrina could be here, or she could be nowhere, and he will never find her, not truly.

If he is honest, the woman in the visions is still not the Katrina he knew, and she is the woman he needs now. He needs her kisses goodnight, her softness and reassurance that something good in this world needs fighting for.

She is gone, and the world could end but who would care? Maybe, if it does, she’ll come back for him. Maybe that is what the Witness does: loses everything, and gains nothing in return.

Tears run down his face, into his beard, and he does not move. On the ground lies a fragment of bone, part of a humerous or femur if he sees it right, and beside it the rotted remains of a skull, half-buried in the wall.

It could be anyone or no-one, Ichabod Crane is past caring. He is too far, too late, too long gone from home, and that skull could be an enemy or a friend or his wife, it matters not. Whoever it is got the safety of a real death, where he, the lover of a witch, was bound instead to Death himself and burdened with the fate of the very world itself.

The world that burned his wife at the stake, and that ruined Abbie Mills’ life two hundred years later. Two centuries, and still this world punishes the strong women he depends upon.

“Crane?” a voice, not the one he clings to but the one he needs, cuts through his reverie. “How are you down here?”

Lieutenant Mills comes around a corner, a more powerful torch than his in her hand. She looks tired, and he feels a swell of guilt: they hauled her out of bed when he went missing; someone saw him, and called her.

“I ah,” he waves a hand, and lies on the spot, “I had another dream, I wanted to check that the witch was truly gone.”

It’s the mirror image of the truth: he had a dream, and wished to know that his witch could, perhaps, live on somehow.

“Right,” she nods, irritated and unimpressed, “the next time you have a magic dream, Crane, you call me.”

“You were sleeping-”

“And you’re terrible at sneaking out, don’t you know not to leave the door wide open?”

“I didn’t think anyone would check,” he argues, lamely, “I would have been back by morning.”

“Uh huh,” she nods, “out in a town where evil forces seem to like running amok, looking for a witch that nearly turned us into lunch meat not five hours ago, without protection. You’d have been back by morning?”

She has a good point, he concedes with a bowed head and shameful glance. “I… apologise, Lieutenant,” he says, at last. “I don’t know what came over me.”

She sighs, and shakes her head, “I’ve done crazier things for worse reasons,” she admits. She starts back down the tunnel, and he follows, feeling like nothing so much as a lost child following a capable older sibling, desperate for forgiveness and approval. Abbie is the only person who believes him at all, the only one who has seen what he saw, who knows what he knows, who has also lost a loved one to whatever horror they face. She is the only thing in this awful new world that makes any sense: he cannot lose her because he woke up and wanted, a little, to crawl back into that hole and die.

“As a child,” he argues, “I am a grown man and… I have ruined your night’s rest. I was foolish.”

“An apology, Crane?” she laughs, tired and wry but mirthful all the same. “That’s new.”

“How did you even find me?” he asks, impressed by her ability to do so, no matter what her answer. “I was certain I’d be lost down here for days.”

“You walked in a circle,” she raises an eyebrow at him, and stops. “Hold up, you didn’t know? The entrance is around this bed, you’ve walked in literally a tight circle. Your footprints left a deep trail.”

He feels a fool, but he has to smile. Some part of him remembered self-preservation.

She sighs, and continues, “They called me to let me know they were looking, anyhow. I volunteered to join in: I knew where you’d go.”

“How?” That staggers him: she would seek him, even when he’d run away from her protection? Even when she desperately needed rest herself?

She shakes her head, “Boy, you’re even dumber than you look. Your wife’s down here, right? Somewhere with the witch bones?” she snorts, “Lord, I wasn’t even sleeping. I was by Corbin’s grave when they called. She didn’t even get that, did she?” she makes a sympathetic noise, and for a moment her hand brushes his, and takes his long fingers in her smaller ones, squeezing lightly in a show of support that almost breaks him again, before she lets go. “I knew where you’d be,” she says, quietly. “It’s where I’d be.”

He nods, struck dumb for the first time he can remember, and follows her out of the sewers and towards her car. “Thank you,” he says, feeling his sanity return in waves, his grief back under control.

“Don’t mention it,” she brushes him off, and he gets into the passenger side without another word.

Katrina might be dead, but he is not alone. And that thought alone is what allows him to sleep dreamlessly for the rest of the night, for the firs time since he woke up in Sleepy Hollow and found that the world had left him behind.

He is not alone, and that, for now, is enough.


End file.
